


Purple Heart

by Sharksdontsleep



Category: Original Work
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Character Death, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Military, Psychic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-15 03:23:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18065648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/pseuds/Sharksdontsleep
Summary: It's not a ghost story. It's a story about ghosts.“I was going to have Tim come stay here for a while, if that’s OK,” John said, one morning, as he was drinking coffee and eating the watery scrambled eggs he insisted on making himself.  “I just thought, with you working from home and all - he won’t be a problem.”“I didn’t think he would be, John.”





	Purple Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Props to the tireless Marycontraire for the cheerleading. Additional content notes in the end notes. Feedback including concrit appreciated. I'm dontsleepsharks at gmail and tumblr.

“I was going to have Tim come stay here for a while, if that’s OK,” John said, one morning, as he was drinking coffee and eating the watery scrambled eggs he insisted on making himself. They reminded him of MRE scrambled eggs. Apparently that was a good thing, or at least, it was something.

“Sure, that’s no problem,” I said, taking a sip of tea. It was too hot, and the tip of my tongue went numb and sandpapery. Dumb, considering how much I cautioned clients not to do that exact thing. 

“He’s just having a hard time right now.” As if I hadn’t just said ‘yes.’ As if he didn’t deliver half the cost of the mortgage on the 25th of each month, like I wasn’t his mother, just some landlady who’ll come after him in a housecoat, wielding a broom if he didn’t pay up. As if he didn’t spend weekends knocking wet piles of leaves out of the gutters, both mine and our neighbors, paid in lemonade and the Martinezes’ papery handshakes. 

“Any friend of yours is always welcome.”

“It’s - look, I owe him.” He took a bite of his eggs and made a face he’d been making since he was a child, when food was bad but he was too polite to say so, but too honest not to wrinkle his nose, just a little. 

It was his cooking, though, and he insisted on making his eggs and washing the pan every day before he left for work, like I might kick him out over something as small as an unsoaked pan, if he didn’t leave his room so neat that it was hard to tell he was even living there. He’d been away long enough that I wanted the reminder, even if it was just his dirty socks left childishly on the floor. He was a grown man now, and he used the hamper. 

“Do you want me to say ‘no’?” I asked, because maybe he did. Maybe his friend had asked and he was looking for an excuse to decline, to tell him his ma was too old and cranky and irritable to have company in the house. “I can, if that’s what you want.”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t.” He shoveled in another forkful of eggs like a CO was about to tell him to quit wasting everyone’s time by eating. Instead, Marmalade, the biggest of the orange tabbies, and the meanest, to everyone who wasn’t me and wasn’t John, hopped in his lap. He scratched her between the ears and I leaned over to get her under her chin. She purred like a lawnmower, guttural and pleased. “I just thought, with you working from home and all - he won’t be a problem.”

“I didn’t think he would be, John.”

 

Tim showed up later that day, pale as a ghost, with a combat-worn duffle stitched with his last name, a fresh bouquet of daisies, and a promise that he was sober and clean. John, hovering behind him, shifting his weight between his feet like he’d done when he was nervous before his eighth grade piano recital. Some things don’t change.

I clipped the daisies’ stems, and settled them in a large jar I’d picked up at some consignment shop or another. The thing about being a psychic who worked out of my house - my clients expected everything to look like it’s at least 20 years old and imbued with mystical properties, or at the very least, cursed. It limited my decorating options. Just once I wanted to get something at Ikea. 

“My nana always said they’ll bloom faster if you add some sugar, ma’am,” Tim said. He had an accent, a John Wayne Texas drawl thick enough that it sounded a little like a joke. He was big, the way John was, filling up my spindly kitchen chair. 

“Sugar,” I said, and retrieved the airtight canister of it. “Never heard that one.” But I spooned a little into the jar with the water - the flowers didn’t seem any worse for it. 

“Appreciate you letting me stay here, ma’am,” Tim said. 

“It’s John’s house too.” 

“Well, still appreciate it.” He gripped the mug of tea with both hands. He had large hands, like John, and they nearly enveloped the mug. 

“You a scout-sniper also?” I asked. “John didn’t say.” 

He nodded. “I am,” he said. No such thing as a past-tense to him or to John; it was who he was.

Tim hunched his shoulders, like he was trying to insulate against the kinds of rude questions John’s high school friends asked in church. How many kills he had. If he ever thought about his targets’ families - his _victims’_ families. If he had PTSD. If he wished he could go back. 

I didn’t ask any of those, or anything about how long he’d be here or what he was planning to do with himself. If he was anything like John, he’d talk when he was ready. 

“When you opened the door,” Tim said, “I thought you must have been John’s sister.” It wasn’t said with the usual tone that people said it in, a mix between admiration and judgment - or with any indication that he was supposed to be flirting and was just bad at it. Just an observation, like he was talking about the weather or the Orioles’ chances that year, both of which had gotten bad in the late summer and were unlikely to get any better. 

“One of the benefits of having him when I was 16.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean -” Tim started.

“No need to apologize.” I rose, fiddling with the tea setup. It felt like a four-cup evening. “I’ve never been sorry about anything concerning John.”

“Well, I guess that makes two of us,” he said, and then kept drinking his tea.

“Hope you’re not allergic to cats,” I said, later, shoving quilts into a pile in the spare bedroom. It was on the first floor, next to my studio, and I imagined him having to run between it and the bathroom the next morning, barefoot and trying to avoid Mrs. Mason’s hysterics over what the tea leaves showed her, which she insisted was always disaster. “Because if you are, you won’t make it through a night here.”

“No, ma’am, no allergies,” he said. “Where did you want these?” 

The floor would have been fine - just another surface to be claimed by cats, and if I resented having to fill the house with kitsch, at least I liked the cats. Everyone expected a psychic to have at least five, and I had six, though all but Marmalade lived mostly outdoors and came and went as they pleased. But the floor probably offended his squared-away sensibilities, even if Tim looked ragged at the edges, his haircut a few inches longer than John allowed himself. 

“There’s a closet at the end of the hall you can put them in,” I said, and he scooped up what would have been at least two armloads for me, taking them out. He came back a few minutes later, still carrying one, the crazy quilt one of my aunt’s made me when John was about five. She’d passed a few summers ago, so old we didn’t know her real age, born on a farm in rural Pennsylvania before anyone really cared about paperwork from the government about something as common as a child. 

“I was going to keep this one in here,” he said. “If that’s OK with you. My feet get - John always teased me for having to bring snivel gear.”

“Not a problem,” I said, and then gestured for him to sit on the bed; I took the chair, which announced my sitting in it with a groan. Another of the problems with old furniture - it knew when you were getting fat. “What is a problem is if you’re drinking or using in my house.”

He didn’t respond for a second, looking at his hands, his arms. Wasn’t rude enough to point out that I said it was John’s house too. Maybe John had been similarly disapproving with him when he invited him to stay. 

I didn’t say anything more for a minute - having a son who was bigger than I was by the time he hit puberty meant I needed parenting tools other than a belt, and silence was my best one. It also worked on clients - give people enough silence and they’ll fill it.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said finally. “I respect that. I’ve been sober two weeks. Going to meetings. Past the worst of it, I think. I’m just trying to live in the world.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that that probably was going to be the worst of it. 

“Good.” I rose, and the chair groaned again, like it needed to fill the silence too. “If you need anything, let me know.”

“Don’t expect to, ma’am,” he said, and then I closed the door behind me, leaving him alone. 

John was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of tea steaming in his hands, though it looked undrunk. Something to hold on to. 

“He’s welcome for as long as he wants to stay,” I said. I just pulled out a tin of cookies that I’d gotten from a church bake sale, and we sat eating them while the rain tapped against the pavement outside. 

It was clearer the next day, the ground soft with water, and my first client wasn’t due for a little while. Good gardening weather, and I put on my gloves, tipped with rubber at the end of each finger, grabbed the bin of tools, and set about weeding.

John had already left for work - construction sites open early, and he had to be there when the crew got in to make sure none of them showed up drunk or hungover enough to be just as bad. He could have done private security, or gone into law enforcement, when he’d gotten back, but he said he liked to see things take shape, and as I dug in the garden that day, I couldn’t disagree. 

Tim came to the back porch, looking younger or possibly just better rested, a cup of coffee in his hands. I waved a good morning, and set about yanking the stilt grass from where it was spilling from the Martinezes’ yard into my garden. John kept their lawn mowed, but this was plant-growing weather, hot and wet, and there was only so much they could do without having to just go and extract grass by the handful. 

Tim offered to help. “Drink your coffee,” I said. “I got chores enough to keep two boys busy, you’ll see.” 

When I was done, he picked up the tool bin and helped dry each one with the chamois I handed him as I rinsed them off under the spigot. “Probably just be in the way anyhow,” he said, to the the question I didn’t ask. “Never did much gardening.”

“It’s good for taking your mind off things. Plus, there’s something satisfying in pulling up stuff that doesn’t want to go.”

“I was a wrestler. In high school. Everyone expects football because I’m from Texas, but I moved around too much for it. Probably the same -” he paused, clearly thinking the word ‘high,’ but not wanting to say it. “Same feeling, I guess.”

“John goes to a boxing gym sometimes. I don’t much like it, on account of his getting hit in the head, but I guess it’s one way to work through all the stuff you all gotta work through.”

“Seems like,” he said. 

I cleaned up for Mrs. Mason, picking the dirt out from under my nails, looping a gauzy scarf around my neck, along with several statement necklaces. I stopped short of putting my hair back with another scarf - there was character and there was excess, and my hair was still damp from the shower. 

“John tell you what I do, Tim?” I asked.

“Fortune-teller?” he said, like he wasn’t sure, even with the get-up.

“Psychic. Tarot cards, tea leaves, that kind of thing. Sometimes I talk to the dead. Depends on what people want, though mostly they all want the same thing.”

“What’s that?” he asked, gamely.

“Peace of mind. Someone to tell them they made the right decisions. That everything’s gonna work out.”

“You sound like a shrink.”

“Probably,” I said, not asking when the last time he’d been to one of those was. Not recently, I guessed. “But it’d be better if you avoided the first floor when I’m with clients.” 

One lumbering too-big boy hanging around was bad - John could walk softly enough to not be heard, and it seemed like Tim had the same skill, seeing as how I didn’t hear him walk after me into the house. Still, nothing ruined the connection to the spiritual realm like a guy with a high and tight milling around, and it’d be better if he was out of the way, seeing that psychics weren’t supposed to have anything as ordinary as houseguests. 

“I was probably gonna check online for local meetings,” John said. “See if one’s close enough to walk.”

“I can drive you after my client leaves,” I said. 

 

“Seems like a good day for a walk,” he said, and I didn’t argue.

John called in the middle of the day, to say hello, which he did sometimes even without a recovering Marine in the house. The guys on the crew teased him for being a mama’s boy, but he’d spent too many nights lying prone in the desert waiting to kill people for stuff like that to bother him, and besides, a bunch of them had asked for my number anyway. I think that bothered him more.

“How’s it going?” 

“You know, Mrs. Mason sees all our inevitable doom.” 

“Only thing that’s doomed is her bank account,” John said. “If she keeps wasting her money on psychics.” 

“Dawna up at church says Mrs. Mason’s youngest daughter is pregnant and she doesn’t know it yet, so I put some stuff in about an undiscovered blessing and that seemed to calm her down a little.”

I could hear John smile over the phone - he sometimes called what I do ‘selling gossip,’ and this was just another check in that column. “How’s Tim doing?” he asked. 

“Out at a meeting. There’s one nearby, over at the library.”

“Good,” John said. “I’ll probably grab him from there once I get off work.”

It was probably to check to make sure he actually went to the meeting, and not somewhere else, but I couldn’t blame him.

They came home a few hours later, Tim with an armful of books that he set on the kitchen table, and John with a pleased expression. On top of the pile of books, there was a DVD of a movie I knew he’d seen already, because I saw it with him. “Thought I might watch it after dinner,” Tim said. “In case you wanted to join.”

“Think I’ll leave you all to it,” I said. “Besides, it’s a hotline night.” I contracted out, doing readings over the phone for the kind of people who called psychic hotlines - the elderly, the lonely, the desperate. It was harder than face-to-face readings, and there was talk of switching to a video chat so we could see clients, even if they couldn’t see us. Still, it was mostly reading tarot cards and people’s inflections, and the pay was pretty decent for what it was. 

They camped out in the living room like John used to do with his friends in high school, a bowl of microwave popcorn between them and some sodas, and I could hear the movie start and stop as they paused it to talk, though I couldn’t hear about what. 

The hotline was active - a few gamblers, the kind who were analytical enough to look at sports stats but superstitious enough to call, were at least interesting, and I looked up the American League standings before predicting who would win in the first round of the postseason. A few old women, the backbone of any psychic’s business, and I mostly listened because their own children probably didn’t. 

When I got downstairs after, ears smarting from the headset mic I wore, Tim was asleep on the couch, a blanket tucked over his feet, and John was sitting on the floor, flipping through one of the books Tim had brought. There was a dragon on the cover. 

“He like the movie?” I asked.

“We just talked, mostly. He fell asleep. I don’t think - I think he’s doing so catching up on it.”

“You’re a good friend to him, John.”

“I’m not, but I’m trying to be,” John said, and he unfolded himself up off the floor, propelling to his full height. He towered over me, filled doorways with his body, and it shouldn’t be surprising, but I remember him crying about a skinned knee or being able to crawl between the pews at church, unseen. He was a small baby, born too early, born too early in my life and in my pregnancy, and it was hard to believe he was as big as he was now, even hunching slightly and sock-footed in my living room.

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s let him sleep.”

A few days passed like that, a week - John went to work, Tim went to meetings, and I went to the spiritual plane and to bingo night, even though I was the youngest person there and I had to verify I wasn’t cheating by sitting next to the pastor’s wife. She didn’t believe in psychics, but she did believe in dishonesty, and I tried to lose as much as possible in a game entirely determined by chance. 

Tim became like one of the cats that came and went, present for meal times or reading on the back porch, thick paperbacks that all seem to revolve around elves and wizards and teenage girls with superpowers. John mostly read nonfiction, though I walked in on him reading over Tim’s shoulder one day, laughing like a loon. 

It was nice to see him that way, wiping the corners of his eyes with his hand, pounding on the tabletop hard enough to make some of the glass fruit rattle in its bowl, even if it made Tim look concerned like I was gonna yell at them for busting a few dusty glass grapes. It was louder than John usually was, and with a booming laugh that made him sound like his grandfather. Nice to see that his face didn’t crack when he cut a smile through it, and that Tim’s didn’t either. I left them to it.

 

It’d been eight days when Tim asked me to lay cards for him and I told him ‘no.’

“I’ll pay.”

“You’ve been eating here for more than a week - if we were that hard up, I’d charge you rent.” 

“I can pay for that too,” Tim said. He was wearing glasses, and they made him look a little owlish, or like Beast from the old X-Men cartoons John loved when he was young. Glasses perched on his nose looking almost too small for his face. He hadn’t cut his hair, even though I’d offered on Sunday, when I normally did John’s. 

“Are you using?” I asked.

A flare of anger, nostrils out and a flash like he might yell before he deflated. “No, ma’am.”

“Then if you’re not using, you’re holding up your end of the bargain. Keep your money.”

“But you won’t -”

“Don’t do cards for people I know,” I said. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably a good policy.”

He didn’t press the point, just padded after me with that infuriating soft walk both he and John did, through the garden, holding a bag that I filled with cucumbers and another I filled with zucchini, and gamely took out the trash, the recycling, lugged laundry baskets up and down the stairs. 

He fumbled folding sheets - not just fitted ones, but the top sheets too. “Here,” I said, and showed him how to walk the sheet in in progressively smaller halves. “Your mother never made you help growing up?” I asked, a little teasing. 

“No, ma’am,” he said, and then bit his lip, considering. “Didn’t know her. Or my dad either. My nana raised me, and then after she passed, I mostly bounced between homes. The Corps did most of the raising, really, though I guess it didn’t take too good, since I’m here and not ...”

“Seems like you’re in the right place,” I said. “At least, for now.” 

He paused, holding a floral sheet long gone soft with too many washings over his arm. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “Not many people would do this for a stranger.” 

“John - he’s always been serious. You make him laugh.” 

Tim smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling with it, though he looked a little sad. It was easy, in that moment, to see what he’d look like when he got older. I saw flashes of it, with John, but usually with him the image of his younger self overlaid it. I didn’t know Tim, not really, and so I could only see the vector of his life - where he was and where he was going.

Something about that night, and no one in the house could sleep. If I were superstitious, I’d blame the full moon, but I’m not, so it was probably my accidentally making caffeinated tea after dinner instead of the decaf stuff. 

I found them out in the garden, Tim holding a shovel and John supervising. I didn’t ask what they were doing - John did this sometimes. He couldn’t sleep, so he dug, and Tim apparently did the same. 

The ground was still soft from the rain, but not so soaked that it turned to mud. He was using a good shovel, not the collapsable trench tools the Marines gave him but a real one that I used to turn the compost pile. 

“He does that sometimes,” I said, nodding to John. 

“Yeah,” Tim said, huffing. “Beats heroin.”

I laughed because there was nothing else much I could do. 

It was a cool night, but Tim had his shirt off and he was pale as the moon in the back light I had on to scare away the racoons that wanted to eat my garden. 

John was offering him encouragements from the sidelines, though he shut up once I got out there, probably because I’d tut at him about swearing where the Martinezes could overhear, deaf as they both were. 

“I ain’t squaring up my corners,” Tim said, poking at the corner of the ditch. “You want your grave to collapse in on you, Marine?” he said, not in his normal accent, but in an impression of John, who laughed. 

Ranger graves. “Defensive fighting positions,” John had explained to me once, because of course the Marines had to make a hole in the ground sound technical. 

The dirt around here was mostly clay, nasty orange stuff that I had to interleave with compost and potting soil to get anything to grow in. It streaked on Tim, and John after he jumped in to help, both looking increasingly like sculptures of themselves. 

Digging is hard work - gardeners know there’s a reason most murder victims, if they’re buried, get buried in shallow graves. No one expects it to be as hard as it is. Still, the two them together, accustomed to digging out hard desert soil, made quick work of it, and soon there was a serviceable enough ditch, large enough to fit them both. 

“Are you going to sleep outside?” I asked, after a while.

“Yes,” Tim said, just as John said, “Maybe.” 

They did sleep outside, not in the ditch, but on the back porch, which seemed even less appealing. John had a set of sleeping bags from some camping expedition he’d gone on as a scout, and they dragged them out, along with a tarp strung up like it was a tent. It was late enough in summer or close enough to fall that the mosquitoes, at least, seemed to be gone, and they both wandered into the kitchen the next day looking rumpled but unbitten.

“Do you think you can talk to the dead?” Tim asked, over coffee, once John had left for work.

“Sure,” I said. “Who can’t? Question is if the dead can talk back.”

Tim laughed. “Book I’m reading, it’s about a girl who can talk to animals and spirits and some shit. Uh, something.”

“You’re asking if what I do is like that?” I asked. It’s not surprising - most people who visit psychics was to know if we believe our own schtick. “The cats don’t talk to me. I mean, they do, but in cat.”

Tim laughed a little. “It’s weird,” he said. “I thought being here, I’d think about it all the time. Just sitting around on my ass bored. Reading, watching TV, going to talk about my feelings once a day.”

“But you’re not?”

He shook his head. “Been thinking about going to see a movie,” he said. “At the place in town that doesn’t sell alcohol at the theater.”

“Are you?” He hadn’t been much farther than the library, as far as I knew, in more than two weeks. Just there, the store when we’d run out of milk. Once to the construction site where John worked. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “Got used to the routine. Don’t know if - it’s dumb as hell, but I don’t know if I can handle that. Might see something that sets me off, run into people I know. I just - I don’t know if I can trust myself to … to not be selfish.”

“Give me your hand,” I said. 

He did, and his palm was still warm from his coffee mug, lifeline a trench in the middle. He didn’t have calluses the way John did, but he had big square fingers that looked used to doing things, and now he was here, not doing much of anything.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“I see someone who spent last night digging a pit,” I said. He still had dirt under his nails. “John does that, when he’s on leave. Says his bed’s too big.” 

Tim blinked at me from behind his glasses. “Sucks sleeping alone in the desert. Gets cold. John wasn’t the worst guy to sleep next to.”

“Don’t lie to me,” I said, mostly to see him smile. “I’m his mother, and I know he snores like a buzzsaw.”

“Yeah,” Tim said. “Guys complained. Said it’d give away our position.”

“Glad it doesn’t bother you. He could use the company, anyway.” 

Tim looked over my shoulder, at the marks on the kitchen door I’d drawn, documenting John as he got taller. Eventually I’d stopped making them, once he’d leveled out. “So does my palm say I should I got see a movie?” he asked. 

“Let’s try the consignment stores first. Your heartline says I need someone to carry things out to the car.”

Tim followed behind like an apparition as I went from store to store. He didn’t offer any opinions about any of the junk I threw into the basket, and I didn’t solicit any of them anyway.

Today was a glass day - I loaded up on depression glass and mid-century modern ceramics. Stuff that needed dusting and maybe a chip or two repaired, in the case of the ceramics, but would sell well either at the swapmeet or online. Nothing that looked particularly special, but enough to make the trip worthwhile. 

There weren’t bags at the checkouts, just boxes and newsprint, and Tim wrapped each piece so it didn’t clink against the others. 

“How do you know what’s worth anything?” he asked. “And what’s just junk?”

“I got a sixth sense for it,” I said, and fluttered my hands like I did when I was doing a reading for a client who clearly wanted a show. 

“Really?” 

“No,” I said. “I got the internet, and 20 or so years of experience.” I didn’t call him a dumbass, but it was implied. 

“Oh,” he said. “I like the green ones.” He pointed to a set of five cups with a delicate floral pattern etched in each one. There had probably been a sixth that’d gotten broken or lost sometime in the last 70 or so years. They weren’t worth what they could be, but they’d sell for more than I paid for them.

We spent some more time digging through stores; Tim had a better eye for this stuff than John did, and he could distinguish between junk and not-junk pretty well.

“What’s that?” I asked him, as he set down a dirty-looking basket marked with an orange sticker listing its price as 50 cents. 

“Looks like a basket,” he says. 

I wet my fingers with a drop of water from my water bottle and rubbed some of the dirt off. “That one’s worth cleaning up,” I said. “I’ll take a look when we get back home, but I’ve never seen that pattern before, and it looks too old to just be Ikea trash.” 

“You got a good eye,” Tim said. 

“Just comes from knowing what to look for.”

“Still,” Tim said, and he carried the boxes out to the car without being asked. 

Tim came back from the library the following day with a book on basket weaving. “Might as well make myself useful,” he said.

“Were you a good student?” I asked. John was - he was neat, polite, organized. There were probably still binders in his room with labeled tabs. 

“No,” Tim said. “Moved too much - never came in at the same place in a class. Had some good teachers though.”

“Couldn’t have been too bad if you made it through all that training John went through.”

Tim considered the book in front of him on the table. “It’s a little different, ma’am, if the guy next to you dies if you don’t listen.”

“Well, I appreciate the help,” I said. 

Tim sat and read on the back porch for much of the rest of the day. 

“You make up your mind about that movie?” I asked him, eventually. John would be getting off work soon. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Think I might try it. But I’d - you feel like coming?”

Which is how I ended up driving them to the movies, John in the back of the car like he was a kid tagging along on a date.

“I’ll get the tickets,” Tim said, when we got there. John peeled off toward the bathroom and I stood alone, scrolling through Facebook. 

Tim returned a few minutes later. “On my phone,” and he scanned them under the ticket-taker’s reader. I didn’t know if he had a seat preference, so I let him choose, the two of them toward the outside of the aisle, an empty seat for my purse and the eventual bucket of popcorn - John had gone to investigate the snack counter - and then me. We were early enough that the lights were still up in the theater, and a few people I knew came in. A hazard of a small town. Anytime I took John to see something rated R when he was in high school, we ran into his teachers. 

This time it was someone from church, the girl who watched the babies during the service, and a boy about the same age with a sad little wisp of a mustache. They were holding hands. She stopped walking when she saw me, and I felt overcome with wanting to explain - who Tim was, why we were sitting there. She didn’t come over, and I didn’t wave. 

The movie was fine, though not really my kind of movie. I expected something with a lot of action in it, but I guess I shouldn’t have. John didn’t even like going to see fireworks on 4th of July, not because they set off anything in him other than annoyance at the smoke, but because people made a fuss as if they should have bothered him. I didn’t know if Tim had a preference either way.

It was a political thriller, a little boring, and I was a little bored. Tim was too, from the way he was shaking his leg, which shook the seat. He got up in the middle of the movie, I assumed to go to the bathroom, but he was gone a while and it seemed like maybe he wasn’t feeling well or he’d just up and left. It was too far from the house for him to walk, but he could have caught a ride. 

I got out my phone and texted John to ask if he was going to go after him, our way of talking in theaters. He must have had his phone off, though. “Hey,” I whispered, loud enough that people in front of me turned back to look. “You’re not going to go see what’s up with Tim?” 

John had an expression like wanted to say something, but maybe didn’t want to say it in the theater in front of people. “I’ll meet you at the car,” I said, and texted Tim on the way out to say the same. It responded with a ‘delivered’ notification, but he hadn’t read it. 

I waited for a while by the car, standing in the warm summer evening. It looked like it might rain; all the rain was making my tomatoes tasteless. I thought about my clients coming the next day - what I was gonna say to them, what kinds of questions I expected them to ask - and checked to see if anyone had bid on my listings. They had, but not as much as I would have liked. 

A read receipt finally popped up from Tim and then three dots that said he was typing. “OMW.” I was annoyed, a little, at having to stand there waiting, but it wasn’t any worse than the movie and as he was walking toward me, I saw he had a pack of Raisinets with him, which he handed me. 

“John said you liked them,” he said. “Sorry, I just - I don’t think this was a good idea.” 

John was trailing behind, and they look like maybe they’d said something to one another, something that neither one of them wanted to say to me, maybe something they were ashamed of saying, in retrospect. The ride home was quiet. 

“I was gonna sleep outside if that was OK,” Tim said, when we got in. 

“You don’t need to ask,” I said. “But it’s going to rain. John can show you where we keep the tarps.”

“Yeah, I got them out last time,” he said. 

He slept that way, and I met in the morning with coffee. It was one of those bright clear mornings where it’s not hot enough to truly get disgusting, but not cool enough to chill you either. About as nice as this area ever got. I almost wished I didn’t have clients that day, so I could have sat out and enjoyed it. 

Tim accepted the cup of coffee, and got up to refill my mug without being asked. When he came back, he looked like he had something to say but wanted some time to pick out his words. 

“There’s a thing in group,” he said. “We’re supposed to - if something is nice, we’re supposed to say that it’s nice. To remember that things are nice, without … you know.”

“It’s a nice morning,” I said. 

“It is.” We sat, drinking coffee, for a while. The Martinezes’ granddaughter was home, and she waved to us from their driveway. She wasn’t much younger than John, and when they’d been growing up, I wondered if they were going to date. They hadn’t. 

“Sorry about yesterday,” Tim said, finally. “I just - I’m in a movie, and it was like I was in all the movies I’ve been in, except I’m sober and I just felt … I had a hard moment. I guess they call it a habit for a reason. I didn’t go and do anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I wasn’t,” I said, and then thought better of it. “I was, but I figured John might have said something to you that made you reconsider.”

“It’s easier here,” Tim said. “There’s a routine.” 

“All the parenting books agree that those are important,” I said. “Guess I never got out of the habit from when John was little.”

“You read a lot of them?” 

“When you’re 16 and knocked up and laid up from being knocked up, what else are you supposed to do?”

“Guess that’s true. Some of the other guys ragged on John for how much he read, but the thing about deployment is that it’s mostly boring, so they’d rag on him and then come shuffling up to him begging to borrow something or another, even if it was those boring-ass biographies of his.”

“Did he let them?” I asked. 

“Eventually,” Tim said, smiling. “You know, I always thought he must have had a little brother or something, the way he razzed on some of the guys.”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s always been just him and me.” 

“Must make it hard, him being gone.”

I shrugged, because when he was on deployment, John called when he could and wrote when he couldn’t call. Now he wasn’t any farther away than his work site. 

Tim didn’t say anything else, and he collected my empty mug from me when he went back in. “I think that basket you found might be worth something,” he said, later that morning. “I was looking it up - and I think it might really be worth something.”

I set him to cleaning it with a soft-bristled toothbrush and then a Q-tip. It was slow work, and when he got frustrated, he knocked dust off by blowing on it. 

“Don’t get spit on my basket,” I said. 

“I could go to the store,” he said. ‘Get some canned air or something.”

“Some of that has propellants in it. I don’t like getting on anything I’m trying to sell. It could discolor it.” 

“Alright,” Tim said, and then set back to it. When he was done, a few hours later, the basket looked like a picture in the book he’d brought home from the library. “You might want to start the bidding price a little higher than you were planning.”

I did, and there wasn’t much interest, at least a first, but I set the auction for a few days longer than I normally would and put alerts on it, which I normally wouldn’t. No one wants a psychic whose phone starts buzzing during a reading. 

It was a hotline night that night, and Tim or John had found John’s old Super Nintendo down in the basement, and they spent the evening setting it up and then swearing loudly at the cartridges when they couldn’t blow the dust out of them. Maybe canned air wasn’t a bad idea. 

They got pretty animated, or at least Tim did, because I actually had to mute my mic between calls to go down and shush them. He had the good sense to look guilty. “Sorry, ma’am.” 

“Just don’t wake the neighbors,” I said, and then retreated back to my calls. 

“Sorry for being loud yesterday,” he said, the next morning. 

“John gets worked up playing too,” I said. “Especially when I beat him at Space Invaders.” 

“That sounds like a challenge,” he said, and that’s I found myself on my living room floor next to Tim, beating him at Space Invaders. It was like riding a bike, except I hadn’t ridden an actual bike since before John was born. Still, my fingers remembered the buttons and I hadn’t gotten much slower, even if Tim was worse competition than John, mostly because John hadn’t tried to go easy on me. 

“It’s weird,” Tim said. “Can’t remember the last time I played video games I wasn’t either drunk or stoned or both.”

I didn’t say anything - he seemed like he had more to say.

“John ever tell you we were on the same team for a while?” he asked. “We’d trade off - he’d be the spotter most days, though my low-light vision was better, especially when we ran out of batteries for our night-vision goggles and had to spend a lot of time staring through our scopes. So we’d sit up at whatever place they put us, just waiting for whoever it was we were supposed to go shoot. Some days it was just watching, seeing people’s habits, who went to people’s houses, who they talked to. Who they owed money to and who owed them money. I thought those days were gonna be easier, but they weren’t - getting to know people before you shot ‘em, who knew that was gonna be bad?”

He looked down at his controller where it was sitting on the carpet, nudging it with his socked toe. 

“John was good to spend those days with. He was like you. Always gave you enough time to say whatever was on your mind. Didn’t judge or if he did, kept it to himself. I appreciate that, I guess, is what I’m saying.” 

“He says I’m in the business of letting people tell themselves what they want to hear,” I said. “I just facilitate the conversation, is all. Give them some space for it. I guess he learned that too.”

“You think that?” he asked. “You think people pay only to hear what they want to hear?” 

From anyone else it would have sounded like a challenge, but from Tim it sounded like what it was - a question, genuinely asked. 

“Pretty much,” I said. “No one pays to get told bad things will happen - unless they only want to hear gloom and doom. It’s a fine line. Maybe other psychics are better at it, though. I don’t know.”

“Sometimes at group - it’s hard. The guy who runs it, he was in the Navy. I was expecting him to be … I don’t know. One of the ladies there can’t even go to the grocery store. I guess I’m not much better, considering.” He picked up the controller, thumbing it, not selecting anything, just toggling around. “Would you mind coming with me, to group? They said you’d be welcome.”

“You sure you don’t want to bring John?” I asked.

He frowned. “We meet during the day, so …”

“Sure,” I said. “I don’t really know if I’d be much help, but sure, if that’s what you want.” 

“It doesn’t have to be tomorrow. Just, at some point.”

Outside, I could see Mrs. Mason’s car pull up. “Crap,” I said. “I gotta go. You mind putting this away?” But he was already winding the cords around the controllers and tucking them back into where the console sat in the TV stand.

I went out that night, no place too exciting - there was a church potluck that I brought a store-bought cake to. I asked if Tim if they could fend for themselves for dinner, and he said he’d figure it out.

“I think there’s spaghetti in the pantry and there should be some sauce somewhere,” I said. It wasn’t much of a dinner, but the pastor’s wife always made sure everyone took home leftovers anyway.

I sat around at one of the picnic tables in the back of the church eating ham and pasta salad, and drinking lemonade from a mix. Some of the teenagers had clearly spiked theirs, and were giggling about it over on one of the sides of the playground. I didn’t say anything, because none of them looked drunk or green enough to throw up from it.

John drank in high school, never enough to cause a scene, but he’d gotten caught once, driven home by a friend’s father who sat him on our porch and lectured him like John didn’t have someone inside who was going to do the exact same thing. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t - that I was trying to be the cool parent or something, just because I had him young. 

Mostly, I told him that if he came home smelling like mouthwash and Febreeze he’d be grounded for a month, and if he came home stinking like anything else, the same would apply. 

The pastor’s wife came over. She was about my age, but her kids were 10 years younger than John, one of whom was drinking on the edge of the playground. 

“How’re you holding up?” she asked. I’d mentioned Tim was staying with us.

“Fine, more or less. It’s good having another set of hands around the garden, though all this rain is bad for my tomatoes.”

She smiled, and she had a piece of parsley on one of her teeth. I scratched my own to show her. 

“You should bring him to services on Sunday,” she said. “I know Mark would appreciate meeting such a close friend of John’s.” Mark was her husband, the pastor.

I didn’t want to tell her about Tim having to leave the movie halfway through. It wasn’t my place to, but I didn’t want to embarrass him, either, dragging him to church only to have him not be able to handle it. 

“Not sure he’s the church type,” I said.

“Everyone’s the church type,” she said. “Just got to have the right encouragement.”

“I’ll ask him,” I said.

“How are _you_ holding up, though?” she asked. “Sometimes, when we’re taking care of other people, we forget to take care of ourselves.” 

“I’m fine,” I said. “Mostly just need to adjust, you know, to him being in the house without John around. He picks up after himself. Mostly just reads or watches TV.” 

“Well, if you ever want some company, you have my number.” 

“I do,” I said. “Thank you.”

I spent most of the rest of the potluck eating dry bundt cake and listening to the young kids play. They were playing some game that wasn’t quite kickball, where the rules seemed to change, and there was a lot of shrieking with laughter. One of the kids, an bossy little girl, seemed to have ideas about what was and what wasn’t fair play. 

I tried to remember what John was like at that age. Quiet, he’d been a quiet kid, even at home when most kids cut loose. Bossy, or the little boy equivalent of it. I’d put him in the scouts as soon as he was old enough; my aunts all said he needed some male role models, and I’d needed the few hours of peace and quiet. I worked more back then, restocking shelves at the supermarket where they didn’t care if he hung out in the back and colored or, later, worked on schoolwork. A job at a gardening center, and I’d found him one day there in the aisles, petting a Chia pet. 

I didn’t get him a dog after that, even though he asked for one. But I did get him his own cat, a little gray tabby with white paws like socks who he’d chase around the yard and who, with some prodding, would chase him right back. I was 22, with a six year old, living in my aunt’s old house. I was trying. And lucky, I guess, to have a kid who never had anything worse happen to him than some falls off his bike or putting his gum in someone else’s hair. 

Tim had said he’d expected John to have a brother, but it was only ever him and me. 

I got sent home from the picnic with leftovers in a paper grocery bag, more ham and pasta salad, cole slaw, mac and cheese, half a loaf of sliced white bread, some more of that crumbly cake. Enough John to take for lunch tomorrow, and have enough left for Tim and me. 

I expected to find Tim and John on the back porch or drinking tea in the kitchen, or watching a movie, but I couldn’t find either of them downstairs. Tim’s door - the guest room door that had, at some point, become Tim’s door - was closed, and John’s was similarly closed upstairs. Maybe they’d turned in early, though it wasn’t even 9 o’clock. 

There were voices too, or really just Tim talking since his voice seemed to carry, loud enough that it took me a second to place where it was coming from - upstairs, in John’s room. If they had the door closed, it must have been something important.

I tried to step heavy, to let them know I was home, and thought about knocking. But the door was shut and they were grown men. They quieted down after a while, and I thought I eventually heard John’s door open and shut. 

When I woke up the next morning, John’s room door was still closed, and I went in, the way I had every Wednesday since he’d been a kid, to get any laundry in the hamper and swipe a rag over his dresser and mirror to keep them from getting too dusty. 

Tim was asleep in John’s bed. He had a shirt on, the covers pushed down, and his hair, which really had gotten long, was matted against the pillow. He didn’t snore, or even breathe heavily, and he didn’t look any younger than he normally did, though in that moment, he looked young in a way that John always did to me. 

I thought about waking him up, but I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t any way other to interpret it for what it was - he could have gone downstairs to sleep, no matter how late it’d been when they were done talking. Could have slept on the floor or the couch or outside if he didn’t want to sleep in his room. I didn’t want to wake him; he needed the sleep, anyway, and I needed some time to myself. 

John didn’t have pictures in frames, except one of his unit, an old one of him at prom with his date, a girl who’d come over a few times to hang out with him. I’d made them keep the door open. Maybe I hadn’t needed to. 

There was more dusting to do, not downstairs, where clients found the dust atmospheric, but up here where people actually lived. I put the rag down on John’s dresser; walked out without closing the door; went downstairs and found the can of black tea that Dawna had gotten me for my birthday. It was looseleaf and I looked for a strainer in the utensil drawer - pulling out the tongs and graters and the zester I never used, the garlic press, a big metal spoon I usually only used for gardening that somehow got in with the other utensils, a set of measuring cups held together by a decaying plastic loop and -

“Hey,” Tim said. He was standing in the doorway. His hair was a mess, his T-shirt stretched out at the collar, rumpled because he’d slept in it. He looked at the pile of utensils sitting on the counter. “Everything OK?”

“I can’t find the tea strainer,” I said. “Have you seen it?”

“What does it look like?”

“Like,” and I cupped my hands together, palms facing each other. “Metal, with mesh.”

“No,” he said. “Sorry, I haven’t.”

“You sure you haven’t moved it?” I asked. “Maybe doing the dishes or something?”

He shrugged, and went to the coffeemaker. The box of filters was empty, and he went into the pantry, emerging with another box, and a refill pack of coffee for the canister. 

I stood between where he was and the coffeemaker. “So you haven’t seen it?” I asked, again.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, maybe I did. I don’t remember.”

“You can’t just come in and act like you own the place.”

He took a step back, his legs hitting the kitchen table. “Is everything OK, Jackie?” he asked. 

“I just -” and I was yelling, could hear myself doing it. “I’m sick of - this isn’t your house, OK. It’s not. You can stay here, but it isn’t yours, and I wish you’d stop acting like it was.”

He pulled out a chair and sat down. “It’s not my house,” he said. “You’re right. It’s yours. If I’ve been here too long, I’m sorry.”

“It’s my house,” I said, and it sounded childish like that. “And John’s.” 

He looked up from where he was sitting. “This morning,” he said. “There was a rag on the dresser when I got up. The door was open. I know I closed it.”

My hands were shaking. I couldn’t stop them. Shaking, and I needed something to hold onto, and I couldn’t find my stupid tea strainer, and I needed something to steady myself. 

“Here,” Tim said, getting up. He pulled out the other chair, offering it to me like a waiter at a nice restaurant. “Let me look for it.”

He opened drawers, rifling through briefly, closing them. He put the utensils on the counter back one by one. He opened up cabinets too high for me to reach, that hadn’t had anything I needed on a regular basis for years, if ever. 

“Is this it?” he asked, holding up a fine mesh metal colander. 

“No,” I said, and I pulled up a picture on my phone of an image search with it. “Here.”

He nodded. I minimized the app on my phone, and looked at the background, a picture of John and me, before his last deployment. 

“If you want me to leave,” he said. “I’ll leave.” 

“I’m not that - look, it surprised me. That’s all.” I didn’t say what ‘it’ was and Tim didn’t ask. 

“I know you like to keep his room the way it was,” he said. “Before. But it helps, going up there. Where he lived.”

“Don’t talk about him like that,” I said. “Like he’s not here anymore.”

“Jackie,” he said, and he had big hands, big around mine as he sat down at the table and took them. “I really think you should come to group. It’d help. He’s gone, and talking about him like he isn’t won’t bring him back.”

“He’s not gone,” I said.

“John died,” he said. “It’s been six months.”

I blinked at that, slowly. I knew that. I forgot sometimes, in those moments when everyone forgets - not the big meaningful ones like his birthday, but the smaller ones. When I turned to ask him to unscrew the lid of a jar. When the corners of his tightly made bed never loosened. 

“I know he died,” I said finally. “But it doesn’t mean he’s gone.” 

Tim frowned. I could tell that he thought I was losing it. Maybe I was. 

“I just meant,” I said. “Can’t you see him too?”

The thing about telling people you’re a psychic is that they always want to know if you believe what you’re selling. Do I really believe I can see the future? Do I think I can speak to the dead? The thing is, anyone can talk to the dead. Walk through a cemetery, tell your mean old aunt what you really thought of her. Wave hi to your high school music teacher who made you mouth in chorus class because you couldn’t carry a tune. Say hello to strangers you never met and never would meet. 

What matters is if the dead can talk back. Or in my case, if you can allow others to hear them. Maybe psychic is the wrong word - a medium? I didn’t know. 

“Is John here now?” he asked slowly, not letting go of my hands, like this was a seance and we needed to be touching.

“No,” I said. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen John, spoken to him. It felt like it’d been yesterday, but I couldn’t remember, exactly. He felt insubstantial, which was a dumb thing to think about a ghost. I knew - of course I knew. I just forgot, with him hanging around the house laughing, sitting at the table when we were all eating. Looking the age I guess he’d always be, but younger too, not a vector but a line, confined on both ends. “No, he isn’t here now.”

Tim looked pained, and his hands weren’t shaking. Or if they were, it was so slightly, it was hard to tell. Sniper’s hands, like John’s. “I’d really like if you came to group with me,” he said. He looked tired, the way he’d been when he’d shown up at my doorstep like a stray. 

“Yeah,” I said. “OK.”

We didn’t talk for most of that morning. Tim said he needed some time, and I guess I did too. He also asked me to hold the extra set of car keys I’d given him, in case he got the urge to go somewhere. I put them in my pocket along with my own set. 

It was a hot bright morning, the last summer morning before fall began to set in. I thinned out the onions, and trimmed the arugula down to about an inch left on its stems. It’d regrow soon enough. The stilt grass had gotten bad again, and there were a few dandelions with their thick, stubborn roots. I tried to loosen as much of the dirt around them as possible before pulling them out. Still, a lot of the root was probably left in, and I’d just be doing the same thing in a few weeks.

I thought about Tim, up in John’s room. Did he have pictures of him that he liked to look at when he missed John, the way I did? Pictures I’d never seen - pictures John had never wanted to show me.

I felt like a fool for not having known. Was John hiding, or just waiting to tell me? I tried to think about how I would have reacted. If I would have cried or thanked him or wondered if it meant he was in danger from other guys in his unit if they’d found out. Or if it would have been like telling me something I already knew.

Did I know? I’m not sure. He dated girls, but never anyone seriously. I figured he was young and handsome and waiting for the right woman. That he knew I didn’t want him to have to grow up that quickly, like I did, though if I’d really thought about it, he’d been grown up for a long time. 

I tried to picture it, him sitting me down in the kitchen, shifting foot to foot, they way he did when he was nervous. Of not knowing what to say, or maybe of having rehearsed it enough times that he just started talking and I had no choice but to listen. It worried me, that he would have been afraid to say something - that I had scared him.

Maybe it was the same with Tim. That deep fear of being turned away, being that unloved kid again, shuffled from school to school. Why he didn’t put into words what was, in retrospect, so obvious. Why I didn’t either, even if I was in the business of saying what could be, so that I sometimes didn’t say what was. 

It was getting hot and there was only so much work I could do to avoid going back in the house. Tim came out instead, holding a glass of water that was cold enough that it dripped on his hand. He gave me it as I walked up, wiping dirt onto my pants. 

I’d need to change. I didn’t know if I was supposed to dress in any particular way for group therapy. If I should put on my psychic gear or my church dress or just try to look like a normal person. Tim wore the same kind of thing most days, nothing nice, but he always looked neat and exact. Squared away. He might let me cut his hair this week. 

I showered and changed into a T-shirt from some fundraiser John did in high school that I never wore and a nice enough pair of jeans. Mom gear, really, and I considered wearing something else, but it was getting close to when we’d have to leave. 

Tim met me downstairs, and he locked the door behind us when we left the house. It was almost too hot to walk, but I got the sense Tim liked the walk to clear his mind, and there were enough trees to provide shade. 

We had only made it a block or so when Tim said that I’d be asked to tell a story about John. 

“It’s just something we all do,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be anything long. Just something that makes you remember him. You can say no if you want.”

“OK,” I said. “I mean, I can think of a few, probably.” We stood at a crosswalk waiting for the light to change. “Do you talk about me with them?” I imagined the feeling of walking into a room where everyone’s heard stories about you - imagined Tim talking about me seeing John’s ghost like it was something I made up.

“Sometimes,” Tim said. “Mostly about how you said ‘yes’ to me when everyone else said ‘no.’”

“John asked me to,” I said. He didn’t ask me to specify when John had asked, but I think he knew. 

It was a good day for a walk, once we were under the cover of trees again, though it got hotter as we approached a more commercial area. There was the corner store John and I had gone to when he was growing up for King Cones and bags of ice. A place that made good Jamaican food. A gas station, a McDonalds, the shell of a video rental place that now sat empty. It occured to me that there were lots of places Tim could have found drugs, or bought beer or liquor, if he’d wanted. Lots of stop-offs along the way, and I probably never would have known. 

I told him that and he didn’t respond for a second. “I think of this like my own gauntlet,” he said. “Like if I got through here and just made it to group and back, then I’d have done something for the day. Like just not being a fuck-up is an accomplishment.”

“I think it is,” I said. “Especially since I wouldn’t have known.”

“My nana always knew,” Tim said. “If I’d cut up at school or run my bike through the neighbor’s yard. I thought she was psychic or something, the way she always knew. I found out later everyone had just called her up about me. That’s how it’d feel, I guess, if I tried to pull something on you.”

I wanted to say that I wasn’t anyone’s grandmother, but the shock of it hit - I’d always assumed I would be, eventually, and now John was dead and I was standing on a corner near the Exxon station and I couldn’t _do_ anything about it. 

“C’mon,” Tim said, and he had his hand on my arm, gentle. “We’re almost there.”

The librarian at the desk wave to Tim, who’d been carrying a bag of books to return. He put them in a pile on the counter, and they chatted for a minute about what he thought of them. 

She pulled a set from behind her desk. “These just came back in,” she said. “They were supposed to get reshelved this afternoon, but I thought you might want them.” She was young and pretty, nothing like I thought of librarians being - her nose was pierced and she had a tattoo looping around one wrist. I wondered if she was flirting or if she felt bad for him since she saw him every day. Maybe she just liked books about dragons. 

Tim accepted the stack as she stamped each one with its return date. “They’re already back there,” she said. “I think Marlena brought cupcakes, so you might want to get them before they go.”

“Thanks,” Tim said, and led me back toward a set of doors with a sign promising meeting rooms. 

I didn’t know what I was expecting - a sterile room with flickering overhead lighting. Bad coffee and folding chairs. Instead, it looked more like a living room, with a few loveseats and soft bean-bag chairs, one of those big wicker seats that looks like a cross between a basket and a baseball glove.

“Sit anywhere,” Tim said. “There’s no assigned seating.” But he sat on one of the loveseats and I sat beside him. 

Some of the rest of the group was there, eating cupcakes, which were devil’s food chocolate with mocha icing. 

A few people in the group - Marlena, who brought the cupcakes, a guy with a crew-cut who looked to be about Tim’s age, an older woman wearing a faded Ravens sweatshirt - came over to say hi to Tim. He introduced me to each of them as John’s mother, and they each nodded and welcomed me to the group. 

It felt like being a church, a little, whenever a new person came or a relative of someone we all knew came. Except they all knew about my son, and I didn’t know a thing about them. It felt like a weight off, not having to explain, but also like something I had to talk around. 

What if I said something that they’d all heard a hundred times, or that contradicted something Tim said? What if Tim had told them things about John I didn’t know, personal things, embarrassing things, and they were all sitting there thinking them about John? They would almost certainly know things about him I didn’t, and that alone hurt. 

Tim must have seen my expression, because he reached out and tapped a hand over mine. “Hey,” he said. “It’s not - if you’re worried about it, you don’t need to share. I just thought I’d mention it.”

Another man came in, a middle-aged guy with close-cropped hair and a well-cared-for beard. He carried himself the way service members all seemed to, leading with his shoulders, and like he just expected to be in charge of the room. It was clear from the way the group murmured around him and then settled into various seats that he was. 

He came over, shaking Tim’s hand. “Good to see you, son,” he said, like he didn’t see Tim every day. “You must be Jackie. I’m Darius.” He leaned to shake my hand as well. He had smooth dry palms. 

“We’ll get started in just a minute,” he said, after I told him it was nice to meet him. “Tim might have mentioned how the group is run, but I wanted to let you know that whatever you choose to share - or if you choose not to share - is OK by me.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll think about it.” 

Darius began by asking everyone to think about their past 24 hours, and to identify one thing that they were happy that had happened and one thing they were looking forward to in the next 24 hours. Everyone, Tim included, closed their eyes to do this, and I did as well. I thought about my garden, how a few of the last tomatoes of the season were heavy on their stems. How the soil smelled after it rained. How the cats and crows were chasing the squirrels off, and how I was looking forward to making pickled green beans. 

I wondered what Tim was thinking about, what good thing had happened to him. What he was looking forward to, if it were anything beyond a walk home and a night’s sleep. If he was ready for things beyond that. 

No one shared what they were looking forward to, or what had made them happy, but Marlena and the kid with the crew-cut were holding hands, and a few people dabbed at their eyes. 

“OK,” Darius said, after a minute. “We’re going to get started.”

He welcomed me into the group and then said. “Does anyone have something they would like to share? A thought, a feeling, a memory, or a want?” He paused, and made eye contact with a few people. It was slow and deliberate, and gave me room to think about things. I thought about how I was sitting on the loveseat, how my legs were aching a little from it. How I’d felt that morning, seeing Tim in John’s old room; the first real time I’d felt like John wasn’t just dead, he was _gone_ and there were things about him that he’d kept secret from me. A memory, a rush of them. And what I wanted - the one thing I couldn’t have. John, whole and unharmed. 

“Would anyone like to volunteer?” 

Tim didn’t, but Marlena did. She told a story about her sister, one of those long meandering stories that meant it was something that really happened. It was nice, listening to her, and she talked about a fight they’d gotten into during her bridal shower, some dumb sister fight that she could remember all the details of. The kind of fight you could only have with family, and it wasn’t really funny or not funny, but she kept laughing a little, not at what she was saying, but maybe just the memory of it.

“Thank you,” Darius said, after, and everyone else echoed his thanks. “Does anyone else have something to share?”

A few people looked at me, and a few looked deliberately not at me, and Tim just coughed slightly into his hand and brushed some crumbs from the cupcake off his shirt. 

“Sure,” I said. It look a minute to get started. There was a lump in my throat that hurt to talk around, and I wished John were here, not just alive, but in this room with me. 

“It’s been raining all summer,” I started, and Darius gave an encouraging nod. “Hasn’t done that since John was twelve. He was taller than me by then, and I felt like I couldn’t ever keep enough food in the house to keep him fed. I was fine until the third week of the month, when money would run out, and TANF didn’t cover - John thought people just went to the grocery store at church. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a food pantry.” 

I took a breath. There was a water cooler across the room, one with the stacks of conical paper cups. Tim saw me looking at it, and got up, dispensing water and bringing it back. 

“It wouldn’t stop raining,” I said. “John made extra money cutting the neighbors’ grass whenever the rain stopped and doing chores, but there wasn’t much for him to do outside, and he was going crazy, cooped up like that. I couldn’t afford scout camp, and there wasn’t really much for him to do, just help out around the neighborhood and up at church. It rained, all the time - I was joking I should have built an ark, but it wasn’t even storming. Just that soaking kind of rain where the ground feels like it’ll never be dry.”

I took a sip of water and a piece of the wax rim of the cup stuck to my lip. I wiped it away. “The basement flooded. It wasn’t really a surprise when it happened, but it did. I had this old busted-up Taurus that barely ran, and John and I headed up to the Sears to try to rent a shop vac to clean up some of the water. But it was 25 bucks and it was that or buy food for the next week. I was ready to give up and go home - I still smoked then, and I ducked out to have a cigarette and John stayed behind, whining about not wanting to stand in the rain. I was down to about the filter, thinking about how we’d probably need to pack the appliances in the basement with towels to keep them from getting ruined, when there was John, lugging that vacuum.”

“I asked him where he got the money - he’d been leaving most of what he’d been making for me, and I wasn’t in a position to say no, even though it hurt. He just said that we had to have it back when the store opened the next morning, and that we shouldn’t break it. He sat in the back seat holding the vacuum in place like it was going to topple over and shatter, sucking his teeth any time I drove even slightly faster than the speed limit.”

“Have any of you tried to vacuum water out of a carpet?” I asked. A few people nodded. “I couldn’t believe how hard it was - we must have filled the vacuum canister twice over, and the carpet felt like it was never going to be dry. I tired myself out with that, and John took over. He must have been at it for an hour or two, just down there with an old iPod I had listening to music and vacuuming. He came up covered in sweat, but looking - triumphant, maybe? Exhausted, but like he’d won. When I went down, the carpet was dry enough that a box fan and an old dehumidifier took care of it. I couldn’t believe it.” 

I emptied the paper cup, a drop of water clinging to the bottom of it. “Now it just feels like - it feels like that, like there’s a flood and I can’t - he’s not - he’s not _here_ ...” 

Tim reached out, laying a hand across mine. My voice was shaking, my hands too. My throat was tight, like I couldn’t swallow, like everything I hadn’t been letting myself feel was going to come up all at once.

I made myself breathe, a few times, and Darius was talking, though I couldn’t hear what he was saying beyond the rushing in my ears like water rising. Next to me, Tim looked - tired, but he always looked tired. Relieved, maybe? He scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand and took several deep breaths of his own. 

I don’t remember what the end of the group session was like, only that I found myself next to Tim, walking home, him carrying a bag of books. It was hot, still, a kind of sticky heat that precedes rain, and all I wanted, in that moment, was what I couldn’t have - John at the door to take the bag of books, to tell us about something that had happened at work, to be there, and to be there and to be there, and he wouldn’t be. 

Or he would, but visible only to me, pinned like a bug under glass, kept even as he crumbled to dust. It hurt to think about. That I had done that, was doing that. 

He wasn’t at the door when we got back, and Tim put the bag of books on the dining room table, and then went into his room, shutting the door. I made myself tea, and drank it, and watched the line of clouds moving in, heavy with rain. 

My phone chimed - an alert. Someone had bid on that basket that Tim had cleaned up. A few someones. A bidding war, far above what I had priced it for. Several months of food and gas money, and I got up to tell Tim that and found him in his room, packing.

“Are you leaving?” 

“Seems like I should,” he said.

“You don’t have to.” I didn’t want him to, either. Before, I wasn’t lonely in the house. John was there. But I’d be alone if he left now. “Where would you go?” 

“Texas, I guess,” he said, like that was any kind of answer.

“I can’t make you stay here,” I said. He didn’t pause packing. “But I’m not asking you to leave, either.”

“I thought ...” he began, and he had more clothing now than he did when he arrived, a few shirts I’d gotten in my various trips to consignment shops. He had to work to cram them into his duffel. 

“I was surprised,” I said. “It surprised me.” I sat on the creaking chair, bringing the crazy quilt laid on it onto my lap. “John’s my son - I should know him better than anyone else, and there was this big part of his life … it hurt. How long were you together?”

Tim sat on the bed, his duffle beside him, spilling out clothing. “Two years, more or less.”

Two years, and John had kept that from me. I winced, and Tim saw it; I waved my hand at him. “It’s not - I just keep thinking - do I know him at all?” I asked. “I didn’t even know he’s gay. He dated girls.”

“He wasn’t,” Tim said. “I was - am. I don’t think he was looking for anything,” he said. “We weren’t together that much, out on deployment. Different units, though we got paired together. And then we were together, just - the way people are. It took awhile, for him, to come around to the idea. But he did.” 

Marmalade came in and hopped up on the bed, purring and kneading the blanket with her paws. Tim reached out to scratch her under her chin. “He didn’t want to tell you in case - in case it wasn’t serious. But you know John. Everything was serious with him.” 

“Yeah,” I said. “It is. Or -” I wanted to say, ‘it was,’ but I couldn’t, couldn’t seem to get the words out. Tim heard them anyway. “I came in here to let you know - that basket you cleaned up, it’s up to a couple thousand dollars. Probably will get more all told. Private museums are competing over it.”

“That’s great, Jackie. Really,” Tim said. “I’ve been thinking I need to stop moping around here. Find some work.” Move on, he doesn’t say. 

Above us, I can hear the patter of rain on the roof. “I’ll lay cards for you,” I said. “You asked, before.”

“You don’t have to.” But he was already drawing himself up off the edge of the bed.

I didn’t put on any of my psychic outfit, didn’t go to the front room I met clients in. Just laid cards on the kitchen table as the rain came down outside. It was one of those hard late-summer storms, the kind that left the air no drier than before it came through. I boiled water for tea and took out the deck that had long gone soft with handling, the one I used for myself when John was overseas. I sent him pictures of cards sometimes, and just got back ‘thanks mom!’ emails. 

I laid cards, and Tim leaned over, considering the pictures on each. The thing with doing readings is that anyone can see what they want to see, and I mostly just tried to tailor what I said to what clients wanted to hear. But it wasn’t that way now - there were things I wanted to say that I wanted Tim to hear, maybe things that I couldn’t say otherwise. 

“This one says that you’ll soon have to make a decision,” I said.

Tim didn’t laugh, but he gave a little grunt like I’d said something funny. “Does it say what I’ll choose?” 

Clients asked that a lot, if cards would tell them what to do. “It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “But your choices are - you should consider your options.” 

“Jackie,” he said. “It’s been - you’ve been - John was lucky to have you. Is lucky to have you.” He looked around, like just saying John’s name out loud was enough to summon him. 

“He’s fading,” I said. I reached for Tim’s hand, and he held mine. John appeared then, not through the wall but in through the doorway, like he was coming home from a day at work. He didn’t seem to notice us sitting there. 

I wondered how long it would be before I stopped seeing him altogether - if he’d just be dishes rattling in their cupboard or a cold spot in the middle of the room. Static on the television. Not even a ghost, just the impression of who my son used to be, as much him as a chalk outline around a body. 

Tim was looking at where John sat, not through him or at a picture, but at John. “He’s here,” Tim said, like it was a surprise. “He’s really here.” He didn’t let my hand go, but he looked - frightened, not of John sitting there, but that he might disappear. 

“John,” he said, and his voice sounded hoarse. 

John looked up, right at Tim, at both of us.

I eased my grip, sliding my fingers out from Tim’s. I almost expected John to flicker, like a light bulb on an aging circuit. But he didn’t. I got up, slowly, careful not to scrape my chair against the floor, and out of the kitchen. Behind me, I could hear both of them talking. It’d been a long time since I’d heard John’s voice. 

 

The next morning, Tim found me out in the garden. He was carrying a cup of coffee. When I’d gone to bed, they were still talking, and their voices carried through the house, a murmur comforting as rain. Tim looked like he’d had a late night - but not the hollow-eyed weariness he’d carried when he’d shown up at my door. 

“Did you say all the things you needed to say to each other?” I asked.

“Yes,” Tim said. “Thank you. John, before he died, he didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding between us. Still, it was - it was good.” 

“Good.” It wasn’t a warm morning, and my breath fogged a little. Fall would be coming soon. 

Tim seemed like he had more to say, and so I stood and waited for him to say it. “I loved him. Love him. Some days, I worry that’ll fade too.”

I reached up, my hand against his cheek. “Moving on isn’t forgetting,” I said. 

He smiled. “I could say the same thing to you.”

“There’s something - here,” I said. I handed him the trowel I was holding. “Back corner of the yard, next to the trellis. Don’t make me dig it up. I don’t think I can. But I want you to have it.”

He went and dug, squatting down, pulling up little shovelfuls of dirt. Digging was hard work, but I hadn't buried it too deep. It was locked, anyway, locked and wrapped in waterproofed sheeting. I’d told the man at the hardware store I was helping my niece make a time capsule project for her school, and he swore this way the way to do it. Still, it was different, digging it up rather than burying, and Tim wasn’t working as quickly as he could have, mostly because he stopped to swipe at his face with his hands. 

He must have hit it, because he dropped the trowel, reaching in to brush the rest of the dirt off with his hands, and then leaning to pull it out. A box, wrapped in plastic. I had the key on my keychain, and I unlooped it and pulled it off, handing it to Tim when he came up to the porch with it.

“If I open this,” he asked. “Does that mean - will he go?”

“I’m not sure.” 

He leaned down over the box. “What’s in here?”

“Copies of government papers,” I said, the kind of papers they didn’t issue a few generations ago, or if they did, they had much less fine print, for something as common as death. “His purple heart.”

He held them both with care, considering each before putting them back into the box and closing it. 

“Give me your hand,” I said, and he held his hand out, palm up, for my inspection. He had big hands, square fingers, a deep lifeline, stubborn as a dandelion root, something hard to yank out. I wondered if John ever thought about getting him a ring. I wondered if he’d leave or if he’d stay, if either of them would. About what I’d do next. 

“What’s it say?” he asked. “You think we’re gonna make it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I think so.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains: a character who is dead but present through psychic powers; themes of grief/grieving and addiction; references to homophobia; and references to being a scout/sniper. I'm dontsleepsharks at gmail and tumblr if you want to reach me to ask for additional tags.


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